SWU 252 - Aesthetics for LifeW1: What is Aesthetics?

The unexamined life is not worth living.

- Attributed to Socrates

1 Introduction

1.1 Aesthetics and Philosophy

• Q: What is Aesthetics?

– Aesthetics is a subfield of philosophy

– The term “aesthetics” was first introduced into philosphical liter-ature by Alexander Baumgarten, in 1750

• Q: What is Philosophy?

– Philosophy, broadly speaking, involves the careful and reasonedEXAMINATION of, or thought about phenomena and conceptsin the world around usa

aThis is not how people use the term philosophy in actual speech! This is the academicdiscipline “philosophy,” not the casual use of the word as in “Well, my philosophy to life is...”

1.2 Aesthetics and Beauty as Value

• One major area of philosophical examination is. the study of how we assign VALUE

• Plato distinguished three major kinds of value (Phaedrus, 246 EC)

1 Goodness

2 Truth

3 Beauty Tatarkiewicz & Kasparek (1981)

• These correlate to how 19th-century philosophers divided up philosophyinto three branches

1 Ethics . How do you assess whether something is good, or better?

2 Logic . How do you assess whether something is true, or valid?

3 Aesthetics . How do you assess whether something is beautiful?

• So we can arrive at the following definition:

DEFINITION: AESTHETICS

The careful and reasoned examination of. beauty as a value-judgement

cf. Baumgarten in the 18th Century:. Aesthetics = The study of “Art, Beauty and Human Sensibility”. (Where “sensibility” ≈ “good taste”)

1.3 Aesthetic Questions

Q1: How do we know that something is beautiful?

Q2: Is beauty/aesthetic appeal and functionality related?. If so, how?

Q3: Is aesthetic appeal/beauty subjective or objective?→Can an aesthetic judgement be predicted with rules?

Q4: What IS the aesthetic judgement?. Pleasure? Awe? Intense Curiosity? ...

• Immanuel Kant proposed an answer to some of these questions:

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Kant’s Theory of Aesthetics

The aesthetic judgement(i.e., the act of judging something beautiful)

1 is subjective (a felt judgement, notan intellectual calculation)

2 is universal (...not just a personalopinion)

3 is disinterested, and (value inde-pendent of usefulness/benefit to per-ceiver)

4 engages imagination and intellect(in addition to the senses)

2 Criteria for Aesthetic Judgements

2.1 What is the Aesthetic Judgement?

“Pine Forest National Park” by Photokanok; freedigitalphotos.net

A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

WHY?

A

box of paperclips on my desk

A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

WHY?

• Observation: People respond to sensory stimuli from the world. eg., with a judgement “It’s beautiful”

→ These responses (and how they pattern in the world). are what AESTHETICS investigates

“Waterfall In Forest” by Porbital; freedigitalphotos.net

A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

WHY?

2

A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

WHY?

”View of Toledo” by El Greco , c. 1596–1600, oil on canvas, 47.75 ×

42.75 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Licensed under

Public Domain via Commons

A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

WHY?

”The Calling of Saint Matthew” by Caravaggio, c.

1599–1600, oil on canvas,340 × 322 cm, Contarelli

Chapel, Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Roma, Li-

censed under Public Domain via Commons

A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

WHY?

”Ratto di Prosperina” by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1621-

22, Sculpture in Marble, 225 cm, Galleria Borghese,

Rome

A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

WHY?

”Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier)” by Picasso,

oil on canvas, 100.3 x 73.6 cm, Museum of Modern

Art New York Licensed under Public Domain via

Commons

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A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

WHY?

• Question: What makes you judge these as beautiful or not?. Are there formal properties that cause beauty in an object?

– Possible Factors: Complexity, simplicity, regularity, symmetry(or asymmetry), proportion, harmony, contrast ...

• Question: How can we describe what makes something beautiful?

• Question: How can we describe what makes something art?

→We’ll discuss how to describe formal characteristics of art:

– Form and composition

– Colour (hue, value, chroma, local vs perceived)

– Light (types of light sources, types of shadows)

• In the past, some people believed that beauty was defined mathematically -i.e., that if an object had the correct proportions, it would be beautiful

– eg., Fibonacci’s Golden Mean

– This 1+√

52 mathematical ratio is

found in nature :

– Classical and High Renaissanceart/architecture often used thisratio as a compositional princi-ple:

Accessed from http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_

17.htm

Accessed from http://seispontozero.blogspot.com.br/

• In this traditional view, beautywas viewed as a. property of the object (“It’s beautiful”)

• This contrasts with Kant’s approach, as Kant suggested that the perceiver isalso a crucial component for beauty value-judgements

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2.2 The Aesthetic Judgement and Art

• Traditionally, an “aesthetic judgement” is a positive judgement. (“It’s beautiful”)

• ... but aesthetics and art are inextricably intertwined

• “What counts as art” and hence beautiful changes over time

A: Beautiful!B: Ugly!C: Neither

A: Art!B: Not Art!

”Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp, , Urinal ”readymade”

signed with joke name; early example of ”Dada” art. A

paradigmatic example of found-art. Photograph by Alfred

Stieglitz. Captions read: ”Fountain by R. Mutt, Photograph

by Alfred Stieglitz, THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDE-

PENDENTS,” Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

• Question: Did you always have the same response to thequestion “Is this beautiful”? and “Is this Art?”

• Question: What makes you judge something as ART or not?. Are there criteria an object must meet. in order for it to count as ART?

– Possible Factors: beauty, intentionality of artist, skill/talent of artist,effort of artist, ...

• Question: How do we assign artistic value to an object?

→We’ll also discuss theories that aim at answering this question

– Representational/Mimetic Function of Art

– The Expressive Nature of Art

– The Value of Art as

* Aesthetic

* Contextualist

* Constructivist

3 Course Expectations

Grade Breakdown V1 V2 V3Instagram Homework (10 at 1%) 10% - -Pop Quizzes (? at ?%) 10% - -Research Project 25% 25% -Midterm 20% 30% 40%Final Exam 25% 35% 50%Participation 10% 10% 10%OVERALL 100% 100% 100%

Week 1: Instagram Assignment Task. Option 1: →Find/create something aesthetically pleasing to you. . - identify one of Kant’s Criteria that it fulfills

. Option 2: →Find something that illustrates Fibonacci’s Ratio

. . - annotate, or discuss the composition in the caption

CourseWebsite:. https://mlouieling.wordpress.com/swu252-2018/

ReferencesStecker, Robert. 2010. Aesthetics and the philosophy of art: An introduction. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw & Christopher Kasparek. 1981. A history of six ideas: An essay in aesthetics .

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